A Radical Faith
The Assassination of Sister Maura
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- $329.00
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- $329.00
Descripción editorial
On a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women-three of them Catholic nuns-were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background.
In A Radical Faith, journalist Eileen Markey breathes life back into one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Who was this woman in the dirt? What led her to this vicious death so far from home? Maura was raised in a tight-knit Irish immigrant community in Queens, New York, during World War II. She became a missionary as a means to a life outside her small, orderly world and by the 1970s was organizing and marching for liberation alongside the poor of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Maura's story offers a window into the evolution of postwar Catholicism: from an inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s to a community of people grappling with what it meant to live with purpose in a shockingly violent world. At its heart, A Radical Faith is an intimate portrait of one woman's spiritual and political transformation and her courageous devotion to justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this irresistible biography, investigative journalist Markey pays homage to Maryknoll sister Maura Clarke, a missionary who became a household name in the United States when she and three fellow church workers Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, and Ita Ford were murdered by El Salvadoran security forces on December 2, 1980 (four of the over 7,500 casualties of that country's brutal 12-year civil war). Through interviews, Clarke's extensive personal correspondence, government and Maryknoll records, and contemporary news coverage of the murders, Markey reconstructs the personal and geopolitical contexts of Sister Maura's work among the poor and disenfranchised in the United States, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Born in 1931, Sister Maura grew up in an era of Catholic nationalism and anti-communism. She joined the Maryknoll order (in part because she yearned for adventure) after completing high school, experienced the upheaval of Vatican II, and was profoundly influenced by the liberation theology and grassroots practice of her fellow missionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Her death made headlines, but Sister Maura's life story shows how political engagement informed by faith does not always map neatly onto national and international agendas. At times, Markey's driving question "How did this woman get here?" seems to remove Sister Maura from the long history of social justice activism within the Christian tradition. Yet overall, the work is a moving portrait of one woman's determination to do what she could to heal a broken world.
